A new teams encounter with DET/TET as a framework for testing – Part 2-Intro workshop

First of all, I want to be clear that this series of posts have nothing to do with Atlassian. These posts are experiences from previous assignments with Jayway, and I am just now gathering my thoughts on it.

The workshop

To get everyone on-board with what we were doing, I started off with a workshop on testing and quality in general. This is important because I want everyone to be on the same page in regards to why testing is carried out and what to expect from it. I carried out the workshop two times at the different locations with all of the developers with some participating support and business consultants as well. As this first round of changes mainly targeted the developers, these were the ones that just had to take part. During these workshops, I also had most of management take part.

I have done this workshop a couple of times before, mainly as a one-day-one time introduction and tutorial to quality, testing, exploratory testing and DET/TET. With this team I had some more knowledge about the context which I could use to adapt the workshop for a better fit. For example I was able to change some of the material with domain language that people are familiar with.

For testers, people that work with testing most of their time, the actual content of this workshop may be on the basic side of things. However, I have created this workshop for teams that have no testers. Also, a big part of the value here are the team discussions about quality and testing of their own product, which may not have been part of discussions earlier. Furthermore, previous discussions most probably did not involve any facilitation.

The basics of DET (Session, People, Focus and Reporting) are the focus of the second part of the workshop. By allowing people to dig in on their own product with the premises of DET, usually creates a space filled with curiosity and playfulness. Also, carrying out an actual test session with a relevant focus area automatically gives payback through bugs found, apart from the obvious healthy discussion around the product of course.

Important factors

There are a couple of things to consider especially when carrying out the first test session in the workshop. Most things that usually are important in DET are also important in the workshop, but remember that the goal of the workshop is to get buy-in for future testing in the same format.

Preparations for testing! Environments, focus areas, test data etc are needed, or-else the whole session will be filled with this which will give a less positive experience of testing.

The above needs preparation done by someone in the team, which needs coaching on everything that is needed. And to understand that it takes time.

Focus areas that are easy to test, preferably things that everyone involved is familiar with.

Areas where bugs can be found, since it is more fun to test if bugs are found. =)

Not over-do the reporting. Usually I have first-timers report with pen and paper on a easy-to-use template.

If time is limited, rather have more debrief time than squeeze too much testing time into the session.